He laughs at me just the right amount when I tell him that watching the Space Shuttle launch makes me want to jump him.

He said to me, when discussing the cake I brought to a party on Friday night (which was incredibly well recieved) "I want to be known as the husband of the woman who bakes That Cake."

It's been a busy-ish weekend. I baked the layers for a buttermilk chocolate cake on Thursday, and also made chocolate buttercream icing for it, but I was tired, so I decided to leave frosting the cake for the next day. Friday I marinated some chicken in a sweet and sour type sauce, to grill at the party we were going to that evening, and baked a lemon-raspberry tart. I drove to the party and met zedrikcayne there, but my route took me in such a way that I had a pretty fantastic view of the Space Shuttle as it went up, though I must still get to KSC for an actual launch one day.(For locals, I was driving along 434 towards Country Club Road.) Sadly, the party was a going away party for people I'm quite fond of, who are heading back to California. Still, good food, good conversation, and it was determined by an impartial audience that dropping a cup containing a urine sample during the fertility testing process (someone else's story) is not nearly as bad as our fertility testing horror story. Oddly, both did in part, involve pee. And I did hear a few stories about the doctors we're likely to see if I'm not pregnant by this fall.

Saturday, I went to a yard sale, where I bought two cherry bookcases, which, will at least temporarily, take up residence in my living room, though they may not remain. I also scored a Trivial Pursuit game, a cute wooden shelf that will work nicely in our living room, a cool glass citrus juicer and a piece of the Pier 1 wine rack that we've got. I also scored a box and a half of Pre-Seed. (The yard sale hosts were the same friends for whom there was a going away party the previous night, who are also dealing with their own fertility issues, but are much further along the intervention route than we are at the moment.)

Cayne's worked pretty much all weekend, but we got some stuff done around the house this morning. I got a bunch of homework done, after much arguing with the text editor to not realign my paragraphs, and to bold only the parts I want bold. I wish he'd been able to take Tuesday off to spend our anniversary together, but not this year. That's okay. I need to get all the stuff together for our trip up north, and find a gift and a dress for the baby shower that we've got to go to. (My cousin's wife is pregnant, apparently there's a baby shower on June 23rd, so we're going since we'll be at my Mom and Dad's. Mom however, has mentioned that the baby has a cleft palate and hole in the heart, and may have other issues, though mentally the baby should be fine. This spurred an interesting conversation with my Mom about how she didn't think she was brave enough to continue a pregnancy knowing that the baby faced serious health problems, and I pointed out that with Stephan's MS, and the unpredictability of MS, they may have felt like their opportunities were limited, but that everyone has different feelings on coping with that news, and if they went forward with it, all we really could do was support them and hope for the best. I, however, am not a big fan of this particular cousin.)

And so, it's now Sunday night, and I've got laundry in the dryer (sheets and towels on the weekend, when Cayne's home to help remake the bed) the Retro music channel on the TV, and I'm playing backgammon with Cayne (who is still at work, but has a lot of downtime right now in between fixing things and waiting for the testers to break them again.)

The XBox died this weekend. Now, for most families, this is upsetting. For us, it's kind of a business necessity. zedrikcayne had an XBox that worked, and and XBox with a bad hard drive. The DVD drive went bad in the XBox that worked, so after much swapping things around we discovered we had two bad XBoxes. This is not crisis-worthy, we'd planned to buy an XBox 360 at some point. Now, it's become a "sooner" instead of "eventually. Feh.

On top of that, Cayne's laptop needs to be replaced soon. It protests when he asks it to run the game he likes (Eve Online) but groans by, and he could make due, except that there's a loose joint inside the computer which is affecting the ability of the computer to run off of ac power, and charge the battery. And his battery life is like 20 minutes. Patch jobs will hold it together for a while, but it's going to have to be replaced at some point.

(The only potentially good part of replacing Cayne's laptop is that my current laptop will run his stuff. Which means that we could consider a dual boot Mac, which would become my computer, and give him this laptop. If I could spend some time using only a Mac and deciding if I liked it, I'd be able to make this decision less reluctantly. I wish I could like, rent or borrow a Mac for a month to play with.)

Picoreview of Alton Brown's Feasting on Asphalt-good summer filler. It's interesting. I do wish they'd captioned the bits where he's talking and on the bike at the same time...I'm having a hard time hearing and understanding him.

Brain Trust Reqest #1:

I'm looking for help with a UPS or two. We seem to have more frequent power outages at the new house, and I'm looking for one UPS that I can plug the desktop computer/modem/router into, which will live in the office, and a second that will probably live in the family room, and which the laptops will get plugged into. I know effectively nothing about them, so I need help.

I'm looking for information about fish-keeping. We're thinking about a fish tank. Freshwater, 20-30 gallons. I'm looking for information about building a healthy, relatively low maintenance system for hearty tropical fish-variety still TBD.

Brain Trust Request #3 If anyone has a better fix for the firefox bug that causes the apostrophe key to bring up the search box than the one I'm using now (which involves opening a tab, going to about:config, and changing the value for accessibility.typeandfind.flashbar) please let me know.

Brain Trust Request #4 is about toasters. I love my toaster oven, but in the interest of preserving limited counter space, I'm thinking about replacing it with an under the cabinet model in the new house. I know there have been issues in the past with fire, but does anyone know anything about current models?

Cayne knocked the laptop over the other day, so until it gets a new power supply (hopefully later this week) I'm stuck with the desktop. I wouldn't mind this at all, but for the fact that it's set up in a really uncomfortable place; on a coffee table in the front alcove (which tends to be cold-so I drag the blankets in and cuddle underneath) in front of a totally butt eating couch. If I'm less present than usual on the internet until the laptop is back in action, that's why.

And a moment of total brain-loss...can't remember the HTML to make a proper link.

Other than that, life is as usual. I need more veggies and then I'm going to read the third of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants books. It's funny to me that I can justify the cost of the second and third of those books in hardcover, but can't convince myself to buy the Princess Diaries books that I don't own yet.

If you are using an e-mail address for me that is not either at livejournal, or at doomcookie dot us for regular e-mail (attachements and such are better sent to gmail or yahoo) then please let me know, so I can make sure you have the primary address. (livejournal defaults to wherever I prefer it to go and if you're not sure where to email me, livejournal is the best way to go.)

I suspect the gmail address will probably be a good place to email me as well.